A new price test in geographic market definition – an application to german retail gasoline market
Melissa Bantle () and
Matthias Muijs ()
Additional contact information
Melissa Bantle: Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Postal: Holstenhofweg 85, 22043 Hamburg
Matthias Muijs: University of Hohenheim, Postal: 70593 Stuttgart
No 180/2018, Working Paper from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg
Abstract:
Market delineation is a fundamental tool in modern antitrust analysis. However, the definition of re- levant markets can be very difficult in practice. This preliminary draft applies a new methodology combining a simple price correlation test with hierarchical clustering -a method known from machine learning- in order to analyze the competitive situation in the German retail gasoline market. Our analysis reveals two remarkable results: At first, there is a uniform pattern across stations of the same brand regarding their maximum daily prices which confirms the claim that prices are partly set centrally. But more importantly, price reactions are also influenced by regional or local market conditions as the price setting of gasoline stations is strongly affected by commuter routes.
Keywords: market definition; gasoline market; price tests; competition; k-means clustering; hierarchical clustering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D40 D43 L10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2018-08-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-com, nep-ene, nep-ind and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.hsu-hh.de/fgvwl/wp-content/uploads/sit ... 8/hsu-wp-vwl-180.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:vhsuwp:2018_180
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Paper from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Bekcmann ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).